25 Replies

We used Continuum in a past MSP i used to work for and enjoyed them. They can call you as much or as little as you would like them to. I setup policies to update and deploy software through Continuum. It was 2 years ago so I'm sure they have vastly improved since then. It was nice though because you could schedule them to reboot and patch servers for you, work on Exchange issues after hours, Cisco, SonicWALL, etc. They had a team literally of experts and the prices were awesome for the service provided. I have a friend from that MSP who consults on the side and he uses them for a client still so that he always has a heads up on their network or so he can create tickets through Continuum to get work done while he's at his regular job.

Yep ive got a demo this thursday. I wanted go get some first hand info from community members first as a controlled enviroment by sales will almost always be done to make it look good. Their site does highly suggest to do a real test drive by breaking things to test their support guys. This doesnt mean they dont have some of their better guys handling those tickets intentionally. So again I wanted real world feedback on their service.

Thanks for the heads up both of you. Ive got a good feeling about Continuum.

1st Post

What was your impression of Continuum? I saw in another of your posts when you were looking to move from break-fix to MSP, I am a one man - two client shop MSP myslef, that you were looking at CentraStage and had been advised of Continuum.

What was the breakdown on costing for the RMM, RMM w/ NOC and w/ AV?

What was the AV integration options the offered.

Have you decided to go with Continuum? If so what was the tipping point.

I started with LabTech in Oct at a huge cost and although I am getting all of my patches done and have great Remote Access I don't believe the $400/ month is worth the 100 clients I have. That was the lowest tier they would offer me. $387 for 250 endpoints.

I actually had my trial extended out for Continuum since I wasn't able to get something to work and it was a bit difficult to get someone to assist me with it at first. Apparently they have really had their company exploding and their quarterly goal of 9000 machines was done in 1 month instead :|. That said, the interface is very useable compared to CentraStage even though it has an old schoolish look. I was told they are going to be releasing an updated interface in the coming months. I've also been told that by Jan 1st they will no longer be signing accounts that spend less than $250 a month with them, but if you get in before that you'll be grandfathered in.

Pricing wise....

Desktops

$4 for basic monitoring/patching all of the tools (Malwarebtyes paid, LogMeIn Pro and Vipre AV

$12 for the same stuff but gets your customers a 1800 number specific to your company that their Pennsylvania based service desk guys, so they are Americans. They will actually remote in and do work, I think 9-6 your site's local time.

$20 gets you all of the same stuff plus 24/7/365 (Holidays and weekends included obviously being 365).

Server (these are taken directly from their pricing pdf)

$15 - For those that prefer a hands-on approach, Essential Care provides back-office

monitoring that helps you reduce the time needed to filter alerts and research

$20 - Are your technicians spending too much time troubleshooting and resolving issues?

With Preferred Server Care, you can completely offload server monitoring and

management to Continuum’s NOC. Alerts generated by our RMM software are sent

to our remote remediation team, which connects to troubled servers to apply the

appropriate solution – and you can monitor systems and ticket statuses from anywhere.

$40 - If you need the best of the best, Elite Server Care has you covered. Our talented

technical teams are ready to investigate and resolve all server issues, whether they

are generated by our RMM alerts or raised by your team via our ticketing system. You

benefit from the Continuum NOC critical notification and remediation teams, as well as

the remote troubleshooting team for your service requests. You can forward any event

identities, application messages, windows error messages and other anomalies to

Continuum for best-effort troubleshooting and resolution.

I've had a few little issues regarding DNS that the NOC fixed on a server that has been on trial. I even plugged in an external hard drive to a server I recently installed and within 10 minutes of plugging the drive in I was getting a call from the guys in India telling me that there was a drive on the machine throwing SMART errors... sure enough the external drive was dieing, luckily enough I was just using it for simple file transfer.

All in all I'm happy with some of the features/cost of the Continuum offering. The people I've spoke to there are very nice, I just wish they were more readily available during my trial period until I get on-boarded. I'm 99% planning on going with Continuum and have planned my entire MSP offering around it at this point.

Keep in mind that for the first 3 months you are with them your required to "Buy" a starter package that runs $250 a month for the first 3 months. But you get some VERY useful stuff in it, of which it gives you part of that back in a credit to put towards the desktop plans, network mapping module (they will make a visio of unlimited customer networks during the module subscription) and a bunch more.

If you want to know more about it, let me know and I can setup a remote desktop or something to show you what the interface looks like, ect and or at least send you some of their marketing PDFs.

One thing that was a big deal for me too...... They give you an MSA that you can use (Master Service Agreement) to have clients of yours sign to cover yourself on pretty much every legal level. They also provide you tons of other documents for you on-boarding new clients and how to close deals and other "educational" like documents.

1st Post

1st Post

The concept with continuum is great but the practice is not all that. We are currently using them and they nearly lost us a major customer because of the slowness of simple tasks and the hoops to get those tasks done. We have had to keep another person on our staff to view every ticket that comes in to make sure it gets done in a timely manner and that it gets done at all. This actually costs us more than when we started using them. Things are getting a little better but I personally have had to bitch and complain every week for months to get things done and my time is worth way more than that. They do great work with the server side of things and reporting about those but that had never been a pain point. Most network management software will give us the same information. We are sticking with them for another month but our customer is still looking to fire us after 5 years of service because of the train wreck start of this service.

We are looking at them now as well. I'm liking what I see, but I do wish there was a lower end desktop option. For $4 per month, you get LMI Pro, Webroot AV and Malwarebytes Pro. And of course patching and other related services. It's not a bad deal for what you get, but not everyone needs or wants to pay for all that.

We have a lot of existing clients who already have AV installed and / or just aren't going to cough up that much for something we already take care of and it's just too much for us to eat the cost. There's also other new / perspective clients where we just want to get our foot in the door and setup some basic monitoring and maybe updates. Then hopefully up sell down the road.

So I like the idea of Continuum as it lets us scale in ways we can't right now. But it sort of leaves us hanging with our existing client base and makes it a little tougher to get started with some clients who just want the basics.

Yeah it would be nice to have a $1.50-$2 plan that didn't include the AV/Malware I'll admit. The server pricing isn't terrible either. Their interface is alright, enough to the point that it didn't bother me but the largest thing is their ticket interface is pretty atrocious. They just redid their scripting which I haven't tried out and switched from Vipre to Webroot (which sounds like a good change). But I too have clients who are locked in to 2 or 3 year Avast licenses which I prefer to use at this point as it's done great and I'm very familiar with it.

My biggest complaint though has been with their communication via phone for their sales and support staff (for the product, not end user side). It feels like they are extremely understaffed for the job they have been given of trying to sell the product to people and also teach them how to use it for new clients on-boarding. I was assured at one point its because they have seen some crazy growth in new customers and they are attempting to expand their staff out.

I also worry with LogMeIn's recent BS price increase of over 700% if it will effect the price and/or option of having LMI with these packages. If they ask for more money to use LMI via continuum, or remove LMI from the list and relegate it to another package then I'll likely leave continuum. The big seller for me was having the LMI Pro. Then again, they run their own out of date version of LMI Pro so maybe they just will refuse to upgrade it, not receiving the new dual screen feature, which is 2 remote screens drawn on 2 local screens mirroring what you'd see in person when in the office.

1st Post

I just wanted to jump in here to give you some real-world details. We are a small IT company north of the border in Canada, and have been paying Continuum a lot of money for the last two years as we took on the 24/7/365 Service Desk Option.

Now, this was done mainly to leverage the Level1-2 type call handling away from our own minimal staff and to SAVE/MAKE us money.

In the last six months, however, we have lost 2 customers (1 not-so-major and 1 a long-time good customer) as well as waivering on our largest account. Needless to say, I slammed the brakes on, pulled the Continuum Service Desk and still use their RMM platform (as I do like that part of it) and the NOC.

Here is where I get annoyed. With these problems having been provided to Continuum, with details of issues had, and the direct relation that there extremely poor service had on my revenue stream, I requested a refund for the last 90 days, of only the Service Desk portion.

The new territory manager seemed eager to please and so he set up a conference call with his director, himself and the service desk director. This turned out to be a huge waste of my time that amounted to "we don't give refunds or credits" even after the wording that they had failed to provide proper service.

I'm now debating whether to find a replacement for the RMM/NOC, although I have to admit, it seems there isn't much that is like Continuum (at the same level and way you pay for services, coupled with ease of use and no server required to run it).

So there you have it. Continuum scores 100 for RMM/NOC support but minus several thousand for their Service Desk offerings and interest in supporting their customers.

1st Post

Hi akITguy,

%uFEFFWe are talking about changing from Labtech to Continuum and the owner of the company is really seriously thinking about using them and is setting up a demo in the coming weeks. I was wondering if you would take a few screenshots of the interface so I could see what I would be working with. We have about 50 clients that equals out to a 300 / 400 machines and so many servers. I keep reading great things about the company but since I'll be the one most responsible for keeping up with Continuum he has requested that I do as much research as possible.

%uFEFFWe are talking about changing from Labtech to Continuum and the owner of the company is really seriously thinking about using them and is setting up a demo in the coming weeks. I was wondering if you would take a few screenshots of the interface so I could see what I would be working with. We have about 50 clients that equals out to a 300 / 400 machines and so many servers. I keep reading great things about the company but since I'll be the one most responsible for keeping up with Continuum he has requested that I do as much research as possible.

We'd love to help with this! If you reach out to mike.barnes@continuum.net, he'd be more than willing to share information and screen shots of the Continuum interface. He can also help you out if you're looking to schedule a demo, trial or time to review the platform and answer any of your questions or concerns.

Hello. Older thread but never too late to post information that could help someone else. Continuum is no better than GFI or Zenith or other RMM provider. They sound good on paper and there have been some good reports coming from IT shops. We are not one of those who can recommend Continuum.

Starting with the onboarding process, which was basically a video to watch, we should have recognized that Continuum is just a high priced RMM. The agent itself is good and we like that you get LogMeIn and Malwarebytes included as well as anti virus protection from Webroot. However, its just a good agent and not a good NOC or support service company

We have been forced, due to issues with the Continuum RMM, to contact there support for help. Out of the 6 times we have worked with Continuum support we have only been truly helped 1 time. All other times it was the blame game routine that I was hoping to get away from. It's not Continuum its Microsoft or Avast or space aliens. With respect I am aware of compatibility issues and certainly see other vendors causing issues.

For the money we pay to Continuum we should not be getting, "its the other vendors problem" Based on our contact with Continuum support I would never let them talk to our clients directly.

I tried bringing this to the attention of our sales person and that went no where. Continuum like some other vendors does not want to hear what they do wrong.

A year ago we switched MSPs which entailed a switch of agents. We were finally getting rid of those bandwidth hog Labtech agents. I was thinking I was a happy camper. Little did I know.

The new MSP installed Continuum agents. It's been slowness hell ever since. The way I see it, there are two major problems with the Continuum agents from an end user perspective and both of them result in systems running extremely slooooooooooow and then not.....and then sloooooooooooooow and then not.........and then slooooooooooow....well, you get the picture. Perhaps this is due to the way our MSP has set things up, perhaps not.

The first problem is related to Windows updates. Our MSP uses the Continuum agents to manage Windows updates. When the agents kick off a Windows update check, which they do several times a week during business hours, you WILL feel it. I've had systems running at 50-70% CPU utilization. My question to the MSP: If Windows manages the process, it occurs at 2:00AM. Why do the agents need to check during business hours and why do they take soooo much cycle time? Their answer via Continuum.....that's the way it is.

Second problem - Malwarebytes. Don't get me wrong, I love Malwarebytes. What I don't do is have it running constantly which is exactly what the Continuum agents do. When running constantly, Malwarebytes seems to be a bit of a pig.

So, my advice, if you're going to use Continuum agents for your clients:

We've been using Continuum now for a little over a year and have it installed on several hundred endpoints. I absolutely have seen what you are talking about on both fronts with updates and MWB.

That said, at least for us, every time we see that problem it's with older and or slower machines. Not saying that as an excuse, but more an explanation of at least what we see. When we have the full blown agent on a Core 2 Duo machine with 2GB of RAM or a newer Pentium or Celeron system or just a cheap system with a slower hard drive and other components or very little RAM, the system will get bogged down by just about anything.

In those cases, applying updates can bog down the system for a very long time. Just to be clear, what is bogging the system down is the Windows processes related to checking what updates are needed and not typically Continuum agents themselves. On those slower machines, the agent will kick off the update check and you can see it suck up 30% or more of the CPU for an hour or more. Faster systems will have a quick blip in CPU that only lasts a few minutes and is generally not noticed.

Updates can absolutely be scheduled for the middle of the night. But of course the problem is that computers are often turned off or asleep in the middle of the night. So it doesn't take long for machines to get very out of date if the update window is missed all the time. You should be able to ask your MSP to limit updates to after hours if you promise to leave your computers on.

Same goes with Malwarebytes. On a more modern or reasonably fast machine, it typically has little or no noticeable impact on performance. On older, under powered or machines with low RAM, it will definitely impact performance. Not leaving MWB running means you are using it for an occasional scan or cleanup. When you leave it running along with Webroot, you stand a lot better chance of stopping Malware before it takes hold vs just cleaning it up after the fact. Our clients have seen a drastic reduction in malware infections since we started doing this.

Again, not saying that's what is happening on your systems, but for us it has always come back to under powered systems. Our clients with modern machines, virtually never notice either the update process or MWB running in the background.

Yeah we've been integrated with Continuum for just over a year now. The process of switching everyone over was a huge undertaking but it went about as well as can be expected. If anyone needs more details on the integration please let me know.

1st Post

I have had a very similar situation as Jeremy Anderson. We have had to QA all the tickets to make sure they have been done completely and correctly and then having to get into it with the tickets that aren't handled correctly and this has only gotten worse with time. the crew in Pittsburgh is talented its for the most part once the ticket gets pushed to the extended help desk which is the Mumbai/NOC or I think now the Philippines as well I'm not sure of this though.We have had servers taken down. permissions removed on a massive scale in AD multiple times. but my favorite is their going in and turning on the services of a retired but not yet removed exchange server. This happened three times once resulting in a client our largest going down for an extended period of time and the other with a different client where we inherited a very dirty environment that had an old exchange server that had not been properly removed and twice in one week they logged in and tried to start the exchange services on this server, All this has lead us to dropping their server level access to 0 which means they are suppose to call us before even logging into a server. This is currently where we have them for all our customers and yet we still have had to go to for us what's called the northeast team to complain that they still from time to time log in to the servers and do things. The really sad part is the owner of our company has started to make up cover story's for their ineptitude. Recently the trend has been to ask the client when they call if they can schedule this for the evening so they can run scripts or if they can schedule to call back in the next four hours. in either situation it defeats the purpose of having the ability to instantly contact the help desk if they are just going to put you off for a later time. Oh and one other favorite thing is to schedule the work for that night then to log in the ticket they were unable to LMI into the machine even though the following morning the machine is up and running and completely accessible by LMI. Over the last 9 months the amount of complaints regarding the Helpdesk has escalated with these guys not declined. It is now costing our company money to review and QA all the tickets they work on. We have gone as far as creating cheat sheets for setting up a new user or cleaning up a machine after a user leaves the company and we still have issues. As one of our clients recently put it he is not paying his employees to spend hours on the phone working with the help desk for hours or having and issue drag on for days because they supposedly schedule it for that night and then it doesn't take place for no good reason,